Facilitator: Ok, I hear you. Let’s start over again.
Client: I’m having trouble remembering to be honest. Every time I try, I just see nothing, no image, but I remember how it felt.
Facilitator: Ok, well, can you tell me?
Client: Sure. I just remember feeling confused. I felt deeply loved and deeply mistreated at the same time.
Facilitator: Ok. Why do think you felt that way.
Client: Something changed in me. I was trying to navigate two different ways of seeing the world. It was a moment of transition.
Facilitator: Even if you can’t remember the whole story, tell me the details you remember.
Consensual Healing
A conversation between a therapist and their client unfolds as a yellow ball swings back and forth. Replicating simple animations of online EMDR videos used to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Consensual Healing feeds Octavia Butler’s short story ‘Bloodchild’ through scripted therapeutic protocols, destabilising relations between coercion and consent, form and content, trauma and fiction.
Music by Juliana Huxtable; sound by Marco Gomez